63. Hush, Season Two

A long, difficult quest for answers during a drought of facts

The story at the center of Hush Season Two starts the night of March 12, 2019 on a windy road snaking up through the trees above Rainier, Oregon.

It was close to 11 pm when 18-year-old Sarah Zuber opened the door of her family home, set on one of those curving dark roads, and told her sister she’d be right back. She needed to take a walk.

Sarah Zuber was found dead the next day. Her body lay on the side of the road less than 400 feet from her front door.

To this day, her family, her friends, the police and the community of Columbia County, Oregon cannot tell you what happened to Sarah. When she walked out her door, it’s like she fell into a crack no one realized was there.

The second season of the investigative podcast Hush — which I make for Oregon Public Broadcasting — is out on October 8. This season’s title is “Love Thy Neighbor,” and it digs deeply into the case of Sarah Zuber. The trailer just dropped yesterday, and you can hear it now:

When you hear me say the words “subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts,” what I mean is “I really need you to subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts, but also to tell everyone you know.” Because when you spend a year or more reporting, like my colleague Ryan Haas and I have done for the last year with Sarah Zuber, making a show of this size takes up a huge space in your life. And even if the project turns out awesome, nothing about the future of a podcast like this is certain.

So really, do it: like it, subscribe to it, review it, tell people you know. I have no illusions that any podcast I make will ever eclipse the popularity of Joe Rogan, but hey, we can try.

The view across the Columbia River from Rainier, Oregon. Spring 2025.

Long-term reporting projects like this season of Hush can also make you feel like you know that person you’re reporting on, even if you never met them. You spend time with the remnants of them — their writings, their photos, the voice texts they sent their friends, their funny videos. You meet them through the people who loved them and who miss them.

And then, over time, you start to get to know the people that have been left behind. You trade song recommendations, “have a good weekend!” texts.

Recently, I went to the east coast, where I had a truly lovely experience at the Library of Congress National Book Festival in Washington DC. It was wonderful (and surprising!) to meet people all the way across the country who knew my work, who’d heard a book, read a podcast or, if you can believe it, subscribed to this newsletter.¹

But the rest of my trip — save for an epic walk through Manhattan with a friend and some exceptional food — was a bit of a bust. My work meetings failed to inspire faith in modern media. I came home feeling bruised and broken that the industry I care so much about is in an extremely bad place, unable or unwilling to weather the storms ahead. And that now, more than ever, perspectives of journalists like me are not the priority. I felt rudderless.

After my plane landed, I took one step out onto our green PDX airport carpet, which means I’m home again, turned on my phone and had a text. It was from Sarah Zuber’s dad. He sent over a Rush song he wanted me to hear. I listened on headphones as I walked through the airport, and felt like it was a reminder: the reason I’m in this profession is for people who feel misunderstood, overlooked, disregarded and underestimated. People who feel not unlike how I often have in my life.² That’s the through-line of my work, and just because it isn’t embraced by the highest halls of media doesn’t mean it’s invalid. In fact, it might actually make it even more valid than I realized.

I believe that doing deep, investigative journalism is only possible if people trust you. And trust is a funny thing. Sometimes we dole it out so easily: we trust the information we hear online because, well, this person in this video saying something that affirms what I believe seems like a nice guy. But in my line of work and the areas I report, trust is a hard-won thing.

On September 4, 2024, I mailed a letter to Sarah’s parents asking for their participation in a long-term reporting project.

Pen, paper, stamp. I still think receiving mail is special. In many ways, I was asking for their trust. Here’s part of what I said:

Part of my work as a journalist is to do deep investigative stories on the people and places the media has otherwise overlooked. This has often led me and my reporting partner, Ryan Haas, into investigations of powerful people whose voices are heard more loudly than the citizens they represent.

We are not like other journalists. Our projects are endeavors that take a long time, and we are not interested in producing fast stories. We would hope to speak to your family over the course of several months. We also want to get to know Sarah through your eyes and words. … Our intent is not to add to your pain, but perhaps give your family an outlet to be heard, to help answer the questions you may have about the investigation and to help people understand why losing Sarah is such an immense loss for so many.

Sarah sounded like such a bright light in this world. I understand she was a gifted writer; as someone who was once a young writer in Oregon with dreams of my own, I wish I could have met her.

This season of Hush is eight episodes long, and will come out every Wednesday through October and November.

I know that asking you to listen to a show about something really sad is a hard ask — especially right now. I get it. But I want you to trust me that this story is about so much more than you think. It’s about a place, and it’s about the people of that place. And I think even if you’ve never been to that specific place — misty, wooded, lush Columbia County, Oregon — you might recognize parts of where you live in that place. In many ways, it’s like so many other counties across the West.

I have to state loudly and clearly right here, right now how incredibly special this show is. Last year, Ryan and I dove deeply into the 25-year incarceration of Jesse Lee Johnson, and what led to his conviction. And our show got results: Johnson is now suing Oregon, and in his lawsuit, his lawyers cite things Ryan and I uncovered in Hush as proof that the police in Salem led a biased investigation.

With Hush, I am given one year to report the living hell out of a story. I take that mission incredibly seriously, because I know how important it is. I also take it as a gesture of trust — that OPB knows that if they let me absolutely cannonball into an issue that has been overlooked, what I find will be important. Maybe even special.

While I would typically say that if you like Hush and you want to see more of it, you should subscribe to OPB, I cannot say with confidence that — given *gestures wildly around the room* — that they’ll keep me around to do more. If you want more investigative work out of me, getting a paid subscription to this newsletter is the only thing that will keep me in the game.

Journalism is completely fucked. I won’t be a mincer of words in this new era we’re living in, where everyone splits hairs and parses what they say so carefully. Not me — journalism: f-u-c-k-e-d. That’s just the truth. National media is dominating everything, committing grievous errors with widespread implications,³ always shifting the focus away from our local communities and back to the political horse race that keeps them in business.

The local news ecosystem in the West has suffered. Nineteen reporters at Cascade PBS lost their jobs this week — that’s a PBS station in Seattle that couldn’t make it work. Home of Amazon, home of Microsoft, and still not enough money to pay 19 reporters? You expect me to believe that?

I think this is a moment for independent reporters like me. We are untethered, yes, and we are just one person, yes, so we can only take on so much work. But if you’re an independent journalist like I am, you’ve seen some shit. You’ve gone months without being paid. You’re doing this without health benefits. You’re scared shitless what happens when you get older. We keep coming back.

We are the people you want to be listening to.

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HEY MONTANA FRIENDS! I’ll be back in October to talk about Blazing Eye Sees All. And look at this incredible list of people I get to be in conversation with!!!

In Bozeman, I’ll be conversing with the great Betsy Gaines Quammen — author of True West and American Zion — at the Country Bookshelf.

In Helena, my friend Kathleen McLaughlin — independent journalist, author of Blood Money and one of my favorite people to scheme with — will be coming up from Butte to chat with me at Montana Book Co.

Two of the greatest humans I know — the University of Montana journalism professors Jule and Lee Banville — will be chatting it up with me at Fact & Fiction in Missoula.⁴

And then I’ll be rounding it all out with a jaunt to Hamilton to chat it up at Chapter One with Russ Lawrence — the former owner of the store, and a journalist as well.

IN NOVEMBER, catch me at these events:

Friday, November 7 - Dudley’s Bookshop Cafe in Bend, Oregon, in conversation with Sarah Pollack and Maggie Kerr

Saturday, November 8 - Portland Book Festival, Pop-Up Reading at the Portland Art Museum

1. One other really heartening takeaway was the major-sports-event-sized crowd at a book festival. I’m not kidding you: thousands of people came to this event! Blocks away from a building inhabited by a person wanting to control how we think, masses of people were buzzing around the festival because of their love of books. It was a book festival, but in many ways, it felt like a mass mobilization for freedom of speech.

2. And yeah, for the people who dig a Rush song.

3. “What are you possibly referring to here, Leah?” I’m so glad you asked: I’m referring exactly to the blind reporting of baseless claims by Utah Governor Spencer Cox that the shooter of Charlie Kirk was a “leftist” by The New York Times, and the repetition of a rumor by The Wall Street Journal that the shooter had carved “trans ideology” into his bullets. The Times has not unearthed any connection the shooter had to leftist ideas; The Journal has not copped to the fact that by repeating this idea of “trans ideology,” they are simply mimicking a far-right talking point. And they haven’t corrected the error.

4. I will be spending the rest of my time in a booth at Butterfly Herbs and drinking as many milkshakes as my body can handle.